Tips for Stepparenting: How to Be a Stepparent

Hit a home run as a step parent by focusing on the child!Courtesy of Dumas family album

Recently, I've lurked on some social media conversations through Facebook and Twitter to gather information on how to be a stepparent for my NJ.com blog. I have found that there is a large number of people, typically biological parents, who think an involved stepparent is a disrespectful attack against the "real mom" or "real dad." I've even had some interesting debates with strangers trying to understand why being an involved adult in the life of any child is a bad thing.

Countless Twitter conversations and online message boards burst with bad advice. Women tell stepmoms to stop acting like loving mothers, because they are not real moms. Don't stepmoms know that it hurts the coveted "real" mom's feelings when she sees her children loved by another woman? Men warn stepdads to avoid getting involved with another man's responsibilities. No man wants to end up financially burdened by a bunch of kids who are not his, right? Even more disappointing, most articles toting "advice" and "tips" for stepparents prove to really be articles on how not to hurt the biological mom's feelings or how not to anger the real dad. There's hardly a focus out there on the child's reality: that they now have more than two parents and that their family dynamic has changed. In fact, I found that merely implying that a stepparent is indeed a parent can ruffle quite a few feathers! It almost seems like there is more public interest in how not to pose a threat to the hypersensitive biological rights of a mother or father. I find this severely inappropriate.

Here's my advice if you're going to be a stepparent or if you've been doing it all wrong already: focus on the child. That's it. If you focus on the child and do what is best for the child, you may find yourself being the only adult who is thinking straight in the midst of petty custody battles, fictional accusations and dramatic displays of parental insecurity. You may even become a better spouse for it. Authentically loving the child of the person you claim to love may translate into you loving the most important part of who your spouse is as a human being - a human being who brought forth another life. Honor your spouse by honoring that said life and treating it with respect, love and a moral compass.

Focusing on the child goes hand-in-hand with another tip on how to be a stepparent: get over yourself. If you cannot get over your own adult ego, there is simply no way that you will ever have the capacity to focus on a little naive being who depends on you for guidance. That "tip" sits nicely in an article for how to be a parent, too, by the way, but I'm trying to help my fellow stepparents here. If you were expecting your life to march on unscathed, and if you were hoping to get your way all of the time, you should have thought twice before becoming a parent since that is what you are now - a parent. However cute and awesome your partner is sans child, the truth is they have a child (or children) and you cannot have or enjoy one without the other.

I'm tired of hearing and reading ridiculous rants on how to be tactful, how to blend families slowly, how to stand on your left pinky toe and do a dance to please your parental counterpart in the other household. That's not a tip. That's not helpful. That's not even healthy. Not being yourself or withholding affection from an innocent child in order to quell the desperate pangs of jealousy coming from a biological parent hurts the child. Being standoffish and self-consumed is never going to make you a great stepparent. It may keep you conveniently out of trouble and out of the line of melodramatic fire, but it does not a good stepparent make. Saying to yourself that your stepchild doesn't like you or finding one hundred outside excuses to cast blame on everyone else but yourself for a lackluster relationship with your stepchild is pathetic.

Focus on the child. Get over yourself. Be the grown-up. Ignore hypersensitive adults who do not know how to focus on the child, even if that child is their own and if you are married to that said hypersensitive soul! That's your job as a stepparent, as a good one. That is all you have to do to get it right. Do what is best for the child. YOUR child in YOUR family will thank you for it - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe never if you're really in a crazy blended family situation, but you didn't become a stepparent for laurels. You became a stepparent out of love, and that love requires you to love a child who is not yours. If this is news to you, you have some soul-searching to do.